14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook apps can be fun and sometimes useful. But sometimes they can become extremely annoying especially when they go viral and you start getting flooded with the same one from all of your friends. Of course, you can easily choose to hide all instances of an app never to be bothered by it again, but recently quiz apps have become increasingly popular and increasingly annoying. And things are about to get a lot worse as Facebook has made the creation of this type of apps significantly easier. The good news though is that it's also made avoiding them easier too.
“Many websites are looking for ways to integrate Facebook Connect, such as commenting using Facebook identity or showing visitors their Facebook friends' recent activity,” Vishu Gupta, a Facebook software engineer, wrote. “Today, we're making this even easier for users to easily integrate Facebook on their websites and widgets with the launch of the Create Application API. Every website that wants to integrate with Facebook needs an API key. The Create Application API allows widget providers to programmatically generate this API key and other necessary settings.”
What all that means is that developers can now create Facebook apps that greatly simplify the process of creating “child applications” based on the original one. One of the most popular examples in this regard is the notorious quiz app. The parent apps allow users to 'easily' create their own customized applications based on them and share them with their friends. This is a great idea in theory but in practice actually creating these child apps hasn't been the most straightforward process.
Facebook apps, even child apps, required users to install the Facebook developer app and get their own API key, something that proved quite tricky for many. With the new API these requirements are gone and users can easily create and deploy their own custom apps. However, this move is likely to increase the number of quiz apps spreading through the social network and with some users already annoyed enough Facebook has also introduced a new feature that enables them to hide all child instances of an app by blocking the parent app altogether. This isn't enabled for all apps by default but if enough users are requesting it Facebook will allow it.